In the art of semiconductor chips there is a need for uniformity and modularism among chips of different processing strengths and capabilities. At first, a customer may only be able to afford chips with one or two processors and associated memories. Later, the customer may decide that because of the demands of his own customers, the system he sells needs devices with more processing capability. However, the technology of existing chips will require him to redesign his system, to accomodate more processor chips or a more powerful processor wtih a different pin-out. Thus, there is a need in the art for modular chips, that is, chips that have the majority of their pin-outs the same whether they contain one processor, or multiple processors.
In the art of semiconductor chips there is also a need for dense packing of processors and memories in a chip. The further apart a processor and an associated memory, the slower the chip. Speed in the existing technology of multi-processor, multi-memory chips is limited by the physical distance between a processor and the memory it shares with the other processors. Thus, there is a need in the art for a multi-processor, multi-memory chip that has more densely packed processors and memories.
The cross-referenced application discloses a multi-link, multi-bus, crossbar switch capable of interconnecting any processor with any memory for the interchange of data. The cross-referenced application also discloses a system which handles multi-processors having multi-memories such that the address space of all of the memories is available to one or more processors concurrently even when the processors are handling different instruction sets. However, the invention of the cross-referenced application suffers from the two deficiencies noted above in the existing technology of semiconductor chips.
The invention overcomes the above-noted and other drawbacks of the prior art by providing a method and apparatus for an integrated circuit having a chip with integrated modular parallelism wherein the integrated circuit has a majority of the same address and data pin-outs for a variable number of processors and memories on the chip.